Author: Sophie Benshitta Maven

Who Has The Power?

I had this deep deep, who knows where it came from feeling, from the time I was conscious of my thoughts, that the problem with the world is that people’s power is kept away from them.

When I observed people, I saw that they had very little control over what they did on any given day.

It seemed that their day was scripted, and most of what they did, I would not choose to do.

In my family, for example, it seemed scripted to wait for my mother to come home, bring groceries, cook them while we were hanging out, eat and then watch TV.

On Sundays we would go out to eat, often, or eat at home, but go out for dessert.

I was born with an imperfect digestive system, maybe because I was a preemie, was born with a two-pound body weight, less than a loaf of bread, a bottle of milk, tiny.

Then my mother refused to feed me by holding me to her breath, though I did get pumped breast milk…

I had colic, I vomited, I was an overall pain in my mother’s but. I weighed under normal weight till I was 9~10… I ate only when I was hungry, and I was not hungry for meals. I picked in my food, picking out a particular thing, like the peas, and left the rest.

I also spent a lot of time alone, contemplating. I haven’t changed a bit, though returning to my eating that way has been a challenge: after all even I got socialized in my 65 years.

My recollection of my first conscious thought of humans being enslaved was around age 9. The school system added religious education to the curriculum, but I was exempted, because I was Jewish. There were a bunch of Jewish kids in the class, but I refused to participate in religious education.

Just like an innate knowing prevented me from eating what was bad for me, an innate knowing prevented me from being programmed to be a bio-robot, a slave, a serf.

The exact thought I had was this: I think that the religion serves one main purpose: that people are too busy doing what they are supposed to do so they don’t have any time to look and think of what they want to do.

And that is true for every area of life, not only religion. You are supposed to do what everybody else is doing.

When I was in Israel, I saw this even clearer: every minute of every day is scripted and commanded for Jewish people, and I would not have any of that.

I knew that someone somehow benefited from people not having time to think, or just be, but I didn’t quite know who, and how, and why…

When on that fateful night, sitting on the stone steps in front of the Western Wall of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, I asked the Creator to reveal itself and it did… I was not the only person on that huge square: there was an Orthodox person swaying back and forth by the wall.

I knew that he had never experienced directly talking to the Creator: instead he was “praying”, reading some prescribed words in Hebrew: none of your own thoughts, none of your own words, none of that.

I have tons of experienced of “secular” churches and schools doing the same thing: Landmark Education, Peak Potentials, all the Internet Marketing gurus: keep them busy so they don’t have time to think.

The internet, cell phones, email, text messages, youtube, all designed to keep you busy so you can’t think, can’t contemplate.

But why would you want to think? Right?

When I look at my students, 99.99% not thinking, I look how come I turned out to be a thinker.
Continue reading “Who Has The Power? It might change moment to moment.”